


Rain

by vaguely_concerned



Series: Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse [22]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 22:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12994113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: That familiar feeling, old now, of being a broken tool, crafted for one singular purpose yet found lacking when put to the test.





	Rain

The rain runs slick against his skin until he can’t tell the difference between that and the blood anymore; his hand shakes too badly to keep the arrow nocked and so he takes it away from the bowstring. It had been a stupid mistake. He should never have let anyone get that close — wouldn’t have, usually, but he’d been distracted by the explosion that had rocked the ground, the center of it too close to where the rest of the team is supposed to be, and for that one crucial second all Hanzo had been able to think was _Jesse_. (When will he learn that one second is all it takes.)

The Talon agent is on his front on the ground, faceless even in death. The blood barely shows up against the black uniform, but it seeps into the puddles like ink, obscenely bright under the lead grey sky. The knife he had held before Hanzo turned it back on him lies discarded next to him, the steel obscured by the sticky red mess. The man’s vest was designed to stop bullets, not a blade — somewhere among all the other voices in the back of Hanzo’s head his father is telling him about ways to wield pieces of the past to outwit the future, an unexpected blade slid between the ribs.   

Jesse. He needs to find Jesse.

He shakes his head but it doesn’t work, everything’s still half-real echoes, like the world has been set underwater while he had his back turned. From this hill he looks down on the lights of the city and they seem wrong, blurring together like running oil paints. After a few steps he stumbles, dizzy, and has to lean against a nearby tree, its leafless skeletal crown looming over him. He squeezes his eyes shut, desperately trying to force himself back into focus.

Jesse.

Shortly after it’s Jesse who finds him, hair darkened with rain and barreling up the hill as fast as his legs will carry him. Hanzo’s heart stops in his chest at the familiar silhouette of him against the horizon.

“Hanzo! Thank god, I was lookin’ all over for — ” He notices the corpse and stutters for a split second as his hand moves to his gun, sharp eyes scanning their surroundings and seeming only partly reassured to find they are the only ones left alive.  

Even through the numbness the relief at seeing him is enough to send Hanzo to his knees. He half collapses against the trunk of the tree and then sits there with his trembling hands pressed over his eyes, listening as Jesse’s footsteps get closer. Despite himself he has to glance up again to make sure he’s actually there — he is, a second flash of red in all the grey. Jesse calls his name again, wide-eyed and entreating.

Hanzo can’t make himself answer.

Jesse spares barely a glance for the dead man, just gives the body a passing kick to make sure it’s really lifeless before scrambling to kneel next to Hanzo. Hanzo reaches out, blindly, runs his hands down Jesse’s sides, his arms, his face, trying to convince himself that he really is here, unharmed.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, his voice hoarse and strange to his own ears.

Jesse shakes wet hair away from his face, looking confused. “I — huh? Oh, because of the big bang back there? That was, uh, _our_ explosion, as it were. Everyone’s fine, I just realized one of the bastards slipped away from us and thought he might’ve tried… hey, you okay?”

Hanzo’s hands fall away, senseless, flopping uselessly into his lap; his body slumps back against the rough bark of the tree trunk, giving up whatever fight it’d still clung on to, pulse going from thundering to sluggish in his veins.

“What’s wrong?” Jesse squeezes his shoulder and tries to get a look at his face, but Hanzo can’t bring himself to meet his eyes. With a flick of his wrist Jesse gets the glove off his right hand and touches Hanzo’s cheek with bare fingers, the only warmth in a cold, disjointed world. His fingers come away red.

“It is not mine,” Hanzo manages, at the alarmed look Jesse sends him. Jesse ducks his head with a small sigh of relief, wiping his hand on his shirt like it’s nothing, like it hasn’t left a stain, like he can’t hear the sound Genji made as the blow connected.

Hanzo’s lungs feel like they have finally stopped pretending it was worth it to keep going — it’s not so much that he can’t breathe. Some part of him has just forgotten why he should.

“Hanzo.”

Hanzo winces at the sound of his name, feels a deep urge to flinch away from his own bones the same way.

“Hey,” Jesse says. “I know it’s hard, just… gimme something here. Should I be gettin’ a doctor, or...”

“No. No, I am simply…” He closes his eyes, his voice feeling too heavy to lift up from his chest. “I am so tired of death.”

“He tried to kill you first, didn’t he?” Jesse says, touching his hand to Hanzo’s neck and then settling it there when he nods jerkily but doesn’t move away. “Doesn’t get much fairer than that.”

“I know. I _know_. It is not — for him.”

Jesse doesn’t say anything, but it’s his watchful silence.

Marshalling the words together seems impossible — he has never put words to this before, and not only because there has been no one to confess it to — but he can tell that Jesse is frightened, his breathing sounding quicker and tighter now than when he’d been running, so he tries anyway. His voice comes out like someone else’s, raw and weak and pathetic.

“I have killed… so many people. It was all I was ever meant to do.” That familiar knowledge, old now, of being a broken tool, crafted for one singular purpose yet found lacking when put to the test. “So why — my father never told me it would…”

Jesse blinks once, then gives a slight nod of understanding, palm shifting to cup the nape of Hanzo’s neck, an openly protective gesture. “Oh.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Hanzo snaps, unable to glance away from his own hands where they are tightly curled in his lap, the blood smeared where it had gushed over his right arm.

“Huh?”

“Like this kind of weakness is… forgivable, not a shameful display of — ”   

Jesse kisses his forehead, the soft touch startling Hanzo out of his line of thought. They look at each other.

Jesse’s eyes are a mirror, though kinder than anything Hanzo has ever seen in his own reflection.

There’s a clearing in the confused storm of Hanzo’s mind, some certainty settling back into his body, some home refounded, however tremulously. Perhaps the way back is easier like this, Jesse’s presence an anchor to a time when things could still have been different. Alone he used to flounder in this state for days.  

With no doubt or room for compromise Jesse says: “Ain’t nothin’ shameful about any of it.”

Hanzo hears himself make a sound like an animal in pain. When Jesse lets their foreheads rest together he closes his eyes, leaning into him helplessly, the yearning waking under his breastbone. Unbidden his fingers relax to search out the warmth of Jesse’s body, hooking into the fabric of his clothes. He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, just listens to Jesse breathing, close and constant. It renders the endless, aching hollowness less relentless, more liveable, almost like he can believe it might one day end.

“This happen often?” Jesse asks, tucking Hanzo’s hair behind his ear and then curling his hand over his cheek, hot as a brand.

“No,” Hanzo sighs eventually, turning into the touch. “Not often, not like that. But I never know exactly what will… hm.”

Jesse shifts, free arm moving to pull him closer and then hesitating.  

“Uh. D’you want some space, or…” He starts to pull away and it sets off an electric current of fear in Hanzo’s chest; he knots his fingers into Jesse’s shirt, clinging to him with more instinct than dignity.

“I — ”

“Okay,” Jesse says, settling back against him and wrapping an arm all the way around him, unheeding of the blood getting on him. “Okay.”

Hanzo can’t get his hands to ease up again.

Jesse winces as his bare forearm brushes Hanzo’s skin. “Jeez, you’re fucking freezing. Hang on.” He takes the serape off and drapes it over Hanzo’s shoulders. Even soaking wet it smells like cigar smoke and sand and the quiet, warm scent of Jesse himself; it’s enough to make him want to cry like a child. “There.”

Hanzo curls the fingers of one hand into the fabric and holds on to Jesse with the other. He wants to say something, but he can’t — he struggles with it for a while, then glances up to meet Jesse’s eyes.

“...c’mere,” Jesse says quietly. Hanzo lets himself be gathered in, face resting in the crook of Jesse’s neck, the familiar whisper of Jesse’s hair against his cheek.

“The others. We should — ” His mouth is about to offer action his body can’t deliver.

Jesse makes a gruff sound. “They’re gonna be fine. Everything was mostly sorted when I left. Take a minute.”

He uses his left hand to cradle Hanzo’s head against him; Hanzo reaches up and fumbles for it, the metal slippery and cold in the rain. Jesse’s hand, another broken thing, another thing lost and mangled and irretrievable. Another failure to protect the few things that had ever really mattered.

The first sob takes him by surprise, the release wrenched out of him like someone just reached in and tore his ribcage open. He hasn’t cried since — he can’t remember. But Jesse presses his lips to the crown of his head and holds him close, rocking them from side to side.

“I got you,” Jesse says, the metal fingers sliding through Hanzo’s hair with aching gentleness. “I’m here. It’s okay. Just breathe.”

Hanzo does.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t think Hanzo has any problems with violence uh ideologically, so to say (considering his family background that would be… impractical and unlikely ha ha, also the whole ‘With every death comes honor…’ thing), but I do feel like he would have some trauma around specifically committing it — maybe after what happened with Genji, or maybe just as a natural eventual consequence of being raised by, y’know. A bunch of generational high-class manipulative murderers *jazz hands*. [ I once had a small flash of insight that this is a thing he kind of shares with Ana, incidentally, ](https://vaguely-concerned.tumblr.com/post/167020286867/thing-i-forgot-to-mention-about-the-junkenstein) which is a parallel I always found a little satisfying b/c I love them both so much.
> 
>  
> 
> Never sit around thinking about the juxtaposition of ‘With every death comes honor — with honor, redemption’ and the way he says shit like ‘...so much death’, ‘death surrounds me’ and ‘such beauty is wasted on the soul of a killer’, is what I’m saying here. It can only end in :(((((


End file.
